Emerging media from the borderlands of Jewish identity

Theory #372 (2)

Craning back my neck to a time somehow faded into the distance, I feel I have lost familiarity. It was so recent—my grandmother lived and we could still set down our bags on her cold red-and-white tiled floor, traipsing through the vast wooden house that distinctly smelt of musky cedar and books. I remember chocolate-covered coffee beans (always saved for my cousin and me in large glass jars that required effort to open). Her house has since been sold and demolished, and I spurn to visit the bare site of where it stood.

I remember Susi’s feeling, her floating softness and thoughtfully formed words; crooked toes and fingers; her quiet smile through which each of her son’s faces showed. It seems we have lost everything of my grandparents, and so suddenly. What I keep of her is her memory—and a memory not-yet-explored through her journals and her kept books from childhood; her “inner presence” still waits to be released. And much of my perception of her (perhaps subconsciously built up and developed through my father: his manner and makeup and his closeness to her) has brought me closer to Susi, even after her death, the connection strengthened. I feel now that I did not know my grandmother as a person. I knew her as a protecting and nurturing woman, an ice cream-offering and paper-editing grandmother, who enjoyed the nature of her immense garden and whose body was slowly deteriorating.

One theory of my father’s, out of his million theories, evolves around the deep emotion, incited in the 1930s and ‘40s, that is passed from generation to generation of Jews, brewing in a fear and anger kept just below the skin.

By beginning with my father and close family, examining from inward to out, I will explore my grandmother, to first understand what I am made up of. My father says that at times he felt Susi’s submerged rage or unease, which, from bursts or motivations within his mother, edged into his life. I have yet to unearth its effects on me, to discover if what my dad feels exists: that subsequent generations are connected to the terror of the Holocaust.

My uncles and father, the four Martin Boys, compose in such varied ways each aspect of my grandparents. Without my grandparents to bind our family together, the familiar feeling of family perceived by a nine year-old remains as it is, without expanding; though family events are comfortable and I watch the adults laugh with each other in an old-buddy way, this bond of feeling had been established under our grandparents. It feels somewhat forced, our fun, as if it is an extension of what once was rather than an unfolding experience.

HALF-REMEMBERED STORIES

In July 2010, we will be rolling out a multi-media exhibition about lost people, lost places, and the quest to reclaim lost memory. In preparation for this exhibit, we've invited 16 young Jews, ages 15 to 25, to blog.